A review of the new TimeVault program, a backup utility for Linux similar to Apple's Time Machine. Covers installation, configuration, usage, and discuses some of the advantages and limitations of its backup abilities. "TimeVault finally offers a complete, easy-to-use, intuitive backup system for Linux. While advanced and experienced users have been able to schedule backups using rsync, cron, and other tools, new users will find Timevault a comfort; knowing that their files can be easily and safely backed up, and reverted to an older state if necessary. The interface is relatively intuitive, and although the configuration could be a bit simpler, beginners should have no problem setting up TimeVault to keep their files safe."

TimeVault suffers from the same problem rbackup, rsnapshot and many others: it performs an "initial backup" which needs as much disk space as the data you want to look after, therefore wasting a lot of disk space. For example, if you have N MB of data, with TimeVault, rbackup, rsnapshot, etc you end up needing 2*N + N' MB, where N' is the amount of diskspace you allocate for snapshots.

A more interesting and efficient approach is implemented by ZFS, Zumastor (http://zumastor.org), NILFS (http://nilfs.org), etc. They do NOT need to perform that initial backup, therefore if you have N MB of data, you only need N + N' MB, which means you save a huge amount of space.

While ZFS and NILFS are filesystems, Zumastor is combined kernelspace/userspace approach which works on Linux on unmodified filesystems (you can use ext3, XFS, etc).

For Zumastor, you need to load a kernel module and apply a few patches to the kernel. Zumastor-enabled kernels for Ubuntu Gutsy are available at my PPA: http://launchpad.net/~pgquiles/+archive (it's Gutsy's stock kernel, with Zumastor; there are two variants: -zumastor and -xenzumastor, which has both Xen and Zumastor patches).

While ZFS and NILFS are filesystems, Zumastor is combined kernelspace/userspace approach which works on Linux on unmodified filesystems (you can use ext3, XFS, etc).

I would immediately go for ZFS (quite a lot of reasons actually, it just beats all the other filesystems available :/ ) but well, that Zumastor sounds like an interesting idea too. I had never heard of that so thank you for the link Might start playing around with it, just out of curiosity, maybe even create a GUI